‘Sea Prayer,’ by Khaled Hosseini

In the fall of 2015, a photograph of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee, lying dead on the beach after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, went viral. It was a disturbing image, and even more disturbing was the fact that he wasn’t the only child who met this fate. Thousands of others perished or went missing trying to make the same journey to safety. Yet, how dire must the circumstances on the ground be to put your child on a boat? As Somali-British poet Warsan Shire put it in her poem “Home,” “you have to understand,/that no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land.”

Inspired by the story of Kurdi, author Khaled Hosseini takes a quasi-poetic approach to the Syrian refugee crisis in his potent, deeply moving book “Sea Prayer.” It’s slim, but essential. Where Hosseini’s popular novels (“The Kite Runner,” “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” “And the Mountains Echoed”) largely played out against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s turbulent history and were often epic and dramatic, “Sea Prayer” is restrained and elegiac.

“Sea Prayer” Photo: Riverhead

The book is structured as a letter to the speaker’s son, Marwan. It opens with a father’s reverie about his childhood just outside Homs, a busy city in Syria. When he was a boy, he and his brothers spread their mattresses on their father’s farmhouse, waking to the sounds of a goat, olive trees, cooking pots. Protests and bombs shatter the family’s life in Homs. Marwan’s father says to his son: “You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark.” In the accompanying image, mothers and children huddle in a makeshift shelter, all brown beams and translucent beige light. A subsequent image is an intimate portrait of parents on the beach, desperately hoping to save their children, promising them — as many of us promise our children — “Hold my hand, nothing bad will happen.”

In its elevation of the pastoral and critique of a dark reality through the interplay of word and image, “Sea Prayer” calls to mind William Blake’s humanitarian “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” The text’s minimalism complements London illustrator Dan Williams’ gorgeous watercolor and ink illustrations. The loose blue, green, black brushstrokes suggest movement — the refugees’ intense need to seek safety on the savage ocean. Electric white dribbles against a black wash evoke “skies spitting bombs.”

The father says, “I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere.” The refugee crisis is made even more devastating when the fortunate look away, unwilling to bear witness, let alone change policy to ameliorate the crisis, unwilling to see that only luck, the accident of birthplace, separates them from the refugees. Referencing the power of witness, a power that floods “Sea Prayer,” the mother whispers to the father: “Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.”

Sea Prayer

By Khaled Hosseini; illustrated by Dan Williams

(Riverhead; 48 pages; $15)

Anita Felicelli

Anita Felicelli
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her debut collection of stories, “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” will be published in October. Email: books@sfchronicle.com